In Business
by Zayz
Summary: Cuddy pays House an awkward surprise visit at Mayfield Psychiatric Hospital. R&R?


A/N: Written, in all seriousness, at 2 AM while praying to God my family wouldn't hear me typing away. What can I say? My brain has decided this story must be told and won't sleep until it has been.

Written pre-season 6, so this is definitely a complete fantasy. I think I got zero details right, but bear with me. I have little knowledge of psych cases, and won't until September 21, 2009.

Raw and largely unedited. Please forgive my 2 AM typos.

Reading and reviewing is adored more than words could ever say.

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**In Business  
By: Zayz**

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_Knock. Knock_.

A boorish, unfeeling hand, with knuckles clearly equipped to handle the hard metal doors in this godforsaken place, rapped out a strangely impersonal knock to make its presence known.

"Dr. House. You have a visitor."

Even the tone of the man was dry, gray, aloof through the speaker mounted a foot above the head of the doctor in question. Like everything in this place, it was wiped clean of identity, of humanity, and made him think of blank walls, all painted the whitest of white.

House sighed, a robotic, half-hearted sound. He reached up from his position on his bed and pressed the intercom button. "If it's Wilson, he'd better have a sandwich on him. I'm starving."

Silence. The guard had already made it very clear he didn't like his job and he refused to speak more than he had to, but House knew he'd heard him. He got up from the bed – painfully, because his leg was stiff and on fire – and gripped his cane for support, watching the door.

Slowly, it opened to reveal the guard and someone who wasn't Wilson.

It was a woman, a woman with wavy brown hair, a sober-looking dull green outfit, and concerned slate eyes. A woman House had been seeing like a bobbing buoy in the swamp of his thoughts ever since he got here. A woman who, at risk for sounding melodramatic, was the reason he finally fell apart, in the end.

_Cuddy_.

For a moment, what little moisture that remained his mouth and throat dried up and evaded him. He felt like he was struck dead, made of lead without the capability of rational, coherent thought. A foreign sensation for someone who favored cogency above all else, but one he was beginning to grudgingly acquaint with.

Their lines of vision crossed and locked for the briefest of seconds as the guard slipped away and left them alone, Cuddy standing timidly at the threshold of House's miserable abode. She was nervous, he was empty, his usually sharp blue eyes flat like champagne without the bubbles.

There she was. Right there. Her body, taking up its usual place in space and time, no different than when he had left it. Her attention solely on him, filled with something barely tapped until today. Her lips pursed with worry.

Somehow, he swallowed and regained some kind of composure.

"You shouldn't have come," he muttered gruffly.

"Wilson…" She said his name and trailed off. It was enough, though. Despite being here, the insult of all insults, House had not yet lost his keen sense of observation and deduction. He nodded to cut her off.

"I figured," he said, "but you still shouldn't have come."

The question was clear as day on her open face. _Why? Why couldn't she be here?_

The answer was clear as day in the privacy of his head. _Because no one should have to see me here like this. Especially you_.

To her, however, he said, "You should go."

"I wanted to see how you were," she said, her words so measured and careful. Something flickered again in her eyes, so similar to his. She continued to linger at the doorway, he by his bed, and the distance between them felt like the Arctic tundra, her words floating towards him and registering one by one.

"And now you have," he replied. Her hesitancy tired him. He was not in the mood to indulge her.

She sighed. "May I come in?"

They caught eyes once more and he could see that this question, this one simple question, could change everything. _May I come in_. An invitation into this room that represented his shame, his fears, the outcome he had steadfastly avoided for so long. An invitation into the saddest, darkest, ruined parts of himself, if she dared to look that closely. An invitation to come into his room.

"Fine," he said as indifferently as he could muster. "I don't care."

She stepped inside, her heels making that funny clacking sound they always made. A familiar sound; one he did not expect here, in this place. It was like munchkins in a Tim Burton film.

Cuddy glanced around the tiny, sorry room once – the simple bed, the walls, the single window giving him a glimpse of a courtyard – and took a seat on the chair opposite the bed. House returned to his original spot on his mattress. They stared at each other. The clock on the opposite wall ticked ever so quietly, as though a guardian reminding them how absolutely pitiful both of them were at making conversation.

Although, granted, it was difficult to know what to say, in such a dire situation.

It had been a little over a month since House had been a resident a Mayfield. In this time, he had done very little to join into the cadence of the hospital. Socialization with other patients was unthinkable, talking to someone undoable. He had come here to better himself, true, but now that he was here, in the actual place where it was supposed to happen, he couldn't bring himself to do it right.

He stayed quiet, alone. He had dug up a piano in the basement and sometimes tinkered with it, filling his ears with the habitual notes, the well-known melodies. He had spoken to Doctor Nolan, his attending, a couple of times, impassively stating his symptoms. Already, he knew he was going to be the doctor's project here, but he wasn't in the mood to be a project. He wasn't in the mood for anything.

Obviously, he had had no Vicodin in the month he had been here. The withdrawal was hell for a while, but he was given something or another to ease it, take away the edge, and eventually, finally, it began to fade. All the things he had felt before, had so dreaded facing, came and went like pages flipped in a magazine – and the shapeless days continued, blending into one another, and it stopped hurting. Or maybe he stopped caring. The fight poured out of him and he remained listless, vacant, a phantom of the dry medical-genius he knew he was.

He had spoken with Wilson a couple of times, of course, and he knew this change in him was alarming. His moods came in bursts of adrenaline, flooding his body like a broken dam powerless to his whims. But then they went away and he was left brooding, until the next wave of despair washed over him. This scared Wilson more than he would ever say, he knew, but he couldn't help it. Things stopped mattering anymore. The moods faded along with the rest of it.

He existed here, but he did not do much more than that. Nobody bothered him, gave him annoying psychoanalysis on the matter, and so he festered. He had even refused a phone call from Wilson. Wilson could wait. The world could wait. There was nothing here that gave him any reason to care and so he didn't.

All of this until…well, until now.

While time had ceased to mean much to House, it still meant something to Cuddy. She was the heartbeat of the hospital, the Dean of Medicine, and she had things she had to do, heinous meetings she had to attend, patients she had to care about. Vaguely, he wondered how she pleaded off of work, what arrangements she made for her daughter, Rachel.

She had made it all the way here to see him, and here they were, sitting here, like schoolchildren, unable to say a single word.

Seconds continued to tick by, turning into minutes. Cuddy still hadn't said anything more after asking to come inside. He wondered why she was here and decided, since he didn't care, that he would ask her.

So he did.

"Why are you here?" he asked.

She started, as though surprised he had said a word – let alone four – to her. Then she cleared her throat and said, "Because I was worried about you."

"You shouldn't have come," he repeated himself.

"If you want me to go, I'll go," she said, gentle enough to stir that pungent sentiment of gratitude and impatience in him. "But…I wanted to talk to you."

"About what?"

He knew fully well what, but it gave him a fleeting sense of satisfaction to see her blush the faintest pink before responding.

"About anything, really," she said. "Anything you want to say or tell me about."

He stared at her.

"I…I want to know how you are," she continued. "I want to know if I can do anything for you…"

"You can't," he said, stony and frankly cold.

She blinked. "Okay."

They were quiet again. The clock graciously continued its ticking to bridge the gap of this unfortunate dialogue and the two broke eye contact, Cuddy's eyes going to a spot beside his left hand and House's eyes falling to the leg of Cuddy's chair.

Then—

"Do you want me to go?" asked Cuddy.

In all honesty, he didn't know how to answer this question. He wasn't sure if he wanted her gone or if he wanted her to stay. He wasn't sure if he wanted to talk to her. He had certainly been thinking about her, but that didn't mean that she was welcome here. It could, but not necessarily.

"Yes," he said.

The word hung between them as though suspended by a gossamer wire, whisper-thin. This seemed right. He did want her to leave. He didn't want her in this place where nothing was the same, where there was no puzzle, no game, no quest, no negotiation, no purpose. He hated change. He hated coming out of the rut he built for himself. He hated it when she asked him questions that elicited yes's and no's when his answer lay somewhere in the vast valley of gray area beneath them.

So she had to go. He looked her in the eye as she digested this progression so she would know he was serious.

A raw, savage part of him wanted her to react now, to appear saddened or disheartened or even frustrated. To appear as though he had some kind of hold in her. To appear as though this trip had been planned for a specific need that would nag at her until it was quenced.

But she didn't do any such thing. She merely nodded and rose, wordlessly, from her chair.

He looked up at her. There was so much he almost wanted to say to her. Shades of "I need you," "I miss you," "I'm sorry." He had always been her project first and foremost – for clinic hours, for various papers, for some tiny glimpse of humanity. She meant something to him, although he did not yet know what. He was here in this miserable plce because his mind had finally shown him that he desperately wanted her. With him.

He wanted her to know this. He parted his dry lips as though he was about to beckon her back, tell her not to leave, no, don't go. But then he looked at her eyes again and that flicker he had seen before reappeared, more pronounced than ever.

And now he was able to recognize it for what it was: Pity.

Cuddy, his boss Cuddy that he had known for half his life, pitied him.

It was too much to bear. He was done with pity. He was done with people looking at him like he was a sad, kicked little puppy waiting in the dirt for someone to save him. He wasn't a kicked puppy. He had always had his own kind of fickle, brittle strength that carried him through the worst of days. How dare she forget that?

He let her slip out of his room the same way she slipped in. She didn't lean in for a kiss or touch his hand or do anything remotely romantic. Cuddy was a romantic at heart, he knew, but she didn't indulge that particular impulse today. She simply left without another word, because she thought that was what he wanted.

The moment she was gone, everything was as quiet as ever in House's gray room. He lay back on his bed, exhausted somehow, as though his small, pitiful encounter with another human being had demanded all the energy his body was willing to give. He closed his eyes, but not for long.

When they opened, he reached his arm back up to the intercom button.

He said, "Can I get Doctor Nolan down here?"

Silence on the other end.

Then—

"He can be there in twenty minutes. Are you going to try and taunt him about his shoes again, or is this for real?"

House paused.

"Yes."

More silence.

Then—

"He will be there in twenty minutes."

House let go of the intercom button and breathed a careful, steady stream of breath. Something heavy began to move around and dissipate from a region just around his small intestine.

He breathed again and closed his eyes, falling into a deep, dreamless slumber for twenty minutes before two more knocks came on his gray, metal door.

_Knock. Knock_.

These knocks had more character to them than the knocks of the guard. They were calm, somehow. This place was so devoid of something to do that House, one of the most renowned diagnosticians and observers in the world, was reduced to analyzing knocks on the door.

But Doctor Nolan stepped in, so deadly calm, and House had no choice but to sit up and look at his brown, brown eyes.

They were in business.

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A/N: A strange little piece, I know, but like I said, I wasn't going to get any sleep until I wrote it. It's 3 AM now. I feel like a total loser…but a review is sure to make me feel a little better.

The gray button right below these words, if you please. Thanks.


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